Hyphens, minus, and dashes in Debian man pages

The obvious solution here is that it is the responsibility of the author to type the correct thing, and one's editor (and/or desktop environment, OS, etc) to convert some keystroke into the right codepoint saved to disk. I include by reference JWZs, er, rant on tabs, spaces and what the physical tab key does as this being not a new problem (or solution). Further consider that a lot of word processors already figure out how to Do The Right Thing with quotes these days; pure "text" editors, usually have some awareness of what is being written, and when configured to personal preferences, should be mostly able to figure out The Right Thing at the time of authorship.

Authors+authoring tools, who care, can be careful, once, and the 78 downstream tools never are allowed to second guess things. Authors+authoring tools who don't care... Well, then the 78 downstream tools at least do what they are directly told without any hackery, and the cause of the errors (if any) becomes clear: the human and/or the single tool they interact with.